>What if China fails?

Posted on October 25, 2010. Filed under: China, Ross Terrill, The Wilson Quarterly |

Ross Terrill on the virtues of selective failure in the heart of Asia @ The Wilson Quarterly.

Seven decades ago President Chiang Kai-Shek wrote in apreface to his wife’s book China Shall Rise Again, “For the rebirth of a people certain factors are necessary. Of these one is that the people should go through a period of trials and tribulations.” China had already endured a century of turmoil when Chiang wrote those words in 1941, but more was to come. In contemplating China’s future, we should remember that its modern past includes numerous failures. The Chinese themselves certainly don’t forget. For decades before the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, China was beset by foreign encroachment and farmers’ uprisings, and, after the establishment of the Chinese republic, it experienced the depredations of regional warlords, an invasion by Japan, civil war, the collapse of Chiang’s regime in the late 1940s, and Mao Zedong’s quarter-century of uneven rule (1949–76).

Initially, Mao cast his lot with the Soviet bloc, but the “everlasting” Sino-Soviet friendship evaporated within two decades. This was a failure. Emerging from Moscow’s embrace in the mid-1960s, Mao announced a “rebirth.” A Cultural Revolution denounced both imperialists (the United States) and back-sliding socialists (the Soviet Union) and promised the coming of Chinese-style revolution worldwide. But the global “countryside” (the Third World) did not “surround” the global “cities” (the developed countries) as Mao had expected, and the Cultural Revolution flopped. Another failure. And another great relief for the West, as China sobered up after Maoism.

Beginning in 1978, Deng Xiaoping used the failure of Maoism as a springboard for replacing class struggle with economic development as China’s top priority. Some in the West exaggerated the degree to which China was becoming capitalist, “just like us,” and amenable to international arrangements made in its absence. We received a warning at Tiananmen Square in 1989 that Deng’s politics were still Leninist, like Mao’s. But soon the American hope in China kicked back into gear. It always does.